Pediatric Practice Management Content – How Good Is It? [Part 2]

Executive summary: what do independent pediatric practices think about their resources for practice management guidance? Not much. SOAPM wins, hospitals lose, and the AAP is somewhere out there.

In our previous episode, I did my best to take apart the demographic information of the respondents to our pediatric practice management content survey. The results were, to me, already fascinating and we haven't gotten to the meat of the story yet!

To recap, the survey goal was "to find out what, if any, demographic and resource-demand patterns exist among independent practices opening up over the last few years." We're going to look at what pediatricians think about the various sources for pediatric practice management content.

After playing around for a bit, I realized that this chart might help illuminate a pattern or two - we asked everyone to rank the quality of the different content resources they use on a scale of 1-5 (5 = excellent, 1=poor). The results:

We should all see the same thing: the best source for pediatric practice management education is SOAPM. The worst source is the hospital or health system that might own a pediatric practice.

Also at the bottom and decidedly below average? The AAP WWW site. AAP Chapters and Districts. AAP, are you listening?

At the top, with SOAPM? Peers and the NCE. Consultants, Users' Conferences, and 3rd parties cluster in the middle and generally have high variation. I'd like to think that, for example, those who attend the PCC UC give it very high marks - but I can't isolate "PCC clients" here, this represents everyone.

It's interesting to note the differences among some key demographic groupings. I didn't put everything up here because the chart would look silly, but you might note that young physicians value SOAPM and the NCE far lower than their older peers while valuing consultants, the AAP WWW site, and even the hospitals/health systems more highly than others. I have my thoughts about why this is, but I'll see if anyone out there wants to jump in first. Perhaps someone who replied to the survey can weigh in. And others can tell me what I've missed so far.